


And so he falls...

by Elenielwen



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Despair!Cole, Drabble, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Oneshot...?, Post-Game, spoilers be here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:36:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elenielwen/pseuds/Elenielwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Solas has left, Ellana Lavellan looses it, her mind and soul breaking at the loss of the last person on Thedas she loves and shares a true bond with. Cole desperately tries to help her in the only ways he knows, trying to stop the constant radiation of overwhelming sorrow, pain and misery. With no one understanding or realizing what's happening to the young boy, thinking it teenage hormones or due to his transition into humanhood, Cole begins to change...</p><p>A "turning into" Despair!Cole, meaning a pre-Despair!Cole oneshot that might be turned into a multiple chapters fic if you guys like it <3</p>
            </blockquote>





	And so he falls...

Ellana Lavellan never saw it happening, but it must have begun when Solas left the inquisition. 

Or perhaps it all began when she lost herself to her grief. It had been grueling, the loss of her only confidant and clan substitute, the event having more or less pointed out just how lonely she was in reality. With her clan gone, all of her family member and old friends being dead, an error in judgement she never stopped blaming herself for, she felt utterly and truly abandoned. Ellana felt like a piece of cloth thrown into a storm with no anchor and no magic to stop it from spiraling upwards, then falling downwards towards its doom.

The once bright and strong elven woman would spend her nights crying herself into exhaustion, pillow scrunched up from over-use, the fabric discoloured and soaked in tears. Sometimes she would even scream into the pillow, thankful the item muffled her wails.

_No one must know._

Waking up with bags under her eyes in the mornings, the elf dutifully put on her ”inquisitor mask”, always eager to find a place where there was unrest so she would be given an excuse to charge headlong into battle. If she died, she knew the world would mourn... but she was not necessarily needed any more. The breach was closed and Thedas more or less enjoyed peace at the moment. Ellana herself just couldn't seem to care about what happened to her life anymore. 

Lavellan preferred long harsh days of battling and hiking, those days when her body would scream at being over-used being the only time when she felt truly alive. When the physical pain overrode the inner one, she felt wonderful. It was the only time she felt as if everything would somehow turn out to solve itself, and the loss of everything she had, felt far away. Manageable.

But deep down inside, the pain formed into a tangle, a knot which was festering and growing in her heart, turning into poison as time went by.

When Ellana stayed in Skyhold she always made sure to stay up over her head busy, preferably double booked. She could not afford one slip, and let the world see just how miserable their icon and saviour of the world truly felt. She could not afford to lose her last companions, those who still followed her because she was Ellana, the strong elf, or Ellana the strong inquisitor. She just could not bear another loss.

The sometimes odd looks of her companions did not register as she whirled from one place to another, busily and almost frantically performed her duties, their banter and friendly jabs tuned out like background noise.

Being so engrossed in her pain, and trying to survive, she did not notice the subtle changes in her expert rogue and most likely Solas' closest friend, Cole.

The changes had been there all along, though in the beginning it was dismissed as a factor of Cole's ascending to human hood, or blamed on ”raging teenage hormones”.

No one thought twice at the way Cole started to almost obsessively fuss over her health and well being, and she certainly did not think twice as she put the flowers he often left in her window in a vase. Kids did that - gave flowers to each other. Lavellan barely even reacted as he brought her a pair of small kittens once, only dutifully scolding him for taking them from their mother, and that one time he brought in a pair of baby nugs into her room, she only carried them back to their mothers with no sort of feelings behind it at all. When he started to leave daggers on her working space or on her spacious bed, the elf would only pick them up and put them in a neat pile, then have a servant bringing them back to the barracks. Everything was just dismissed as Cole being... Cole. 

Though the things he brought to her room increased as time went on, still no one thought twice. It became a sort of habit to listen to him always insisting on following her around or go along on missions, the appearing of him almost everywhere she looked becoming something of an every day occurrence. It all bubbled down to a subtle feeling of nuisance, dealt with like everything else. With a sort of professionalism she could do in her sleep by now as the inquisitor, she mercilessly dealt with Cole's antics, and automatically brought him along on mission, simply because Varric were more and more often unavailable. Her actions had absolutely no deeper feelings behind them.

No one truly reacted either at those times he would appear in front of her during the battles to stop her from becoming injured, using his body as a living shield. The only time anyone reacted was the one time that action fatally injured the former spirit. But just like everything else, Ellana dealt with that with a de-attached professionalism

Varric had of course scolded him when they came back to Skyhold, but no one had reacted in particularly at the way he had fumed and raged over their scolding, starting to frantically yell about pain, poison and lights fading, as Varric had asked him to slow down and speak “human”, as the dwarf called it. Cole's eyes had shone with an eerie light for a second then, his aura becoming overwhelmingly powerful, before he broke eye contact and stormed off.

Varric had only shook his head in exasperation that time, and let him go with a; ”the kid just needs some time alone to come to terms with his new life and feelings. Don't look too much into it, Hoodie. You know how all rash and fitful teenagers can be and the kid always reverts back to his crazy talks when he's stressed out. Let him work shit through”.

 

_Yes. Let's leave it at that._

 

And so time went on with more such episodes, without anyone truly reacting.

 

Ellana never gave up searching for Solas, her emotions shut off during the days, and bleeding into the fade at nights. Her broken shell of a mind would scour the fade, never giving up on trying to find her other side of herself, her  _vhenan,_  her love, her... everything. 

 

Alone, and with no one to vent to, the pain begun to also affecting her physically, her body starting to lose weight and bags of purple appeared more and more frequently underneath her now dully green eyes.

The mind, unable to cope with the long term strain, took upon itself to vent during her few hours of sleep, and so she never felt rested, even if she slept for a long time in a row.

Tossing and turning on her giant Orlesian inspired bed, she did not notice Cole finding himself more and more often spending the entirety of the nights perched on the end of her bed, rocking back and forth, his now long blond bangs swaying as he did. Icy blue eyes would shine as his fingers mixed with unkept hair as he tangled his hands in long blond tresses, pressing his fingers against his scalp, yanking at the hair in frustration. Rocking heavily back and forth with murmors of words he barely understood himself, his body would shake as having a severe fever. Sometimes when she wailed in her sleep, he cried too, a desperate and ragged noise as he tried to keep it in. Lavellan was too exhausted and too deep inside of her nightmares to hear his struggle.

Other times he sung her old elven lullabys as he stared fixated at her, his mind becoming engrossed and flooded by her nightmares.

Then there were those times Ellana would cry out so loudly, he would feel compelled to lay down next to her. With eerily shining eyes, he would then crush her shaking form against his chest, holding her as she tossed and turned. His mind always became completely engulfed in her hurts when he lay so close, images leaking out of her like a tidal wave of misery that draped around him like a thick blanket, choking, constricting.

He felt like he would drown in those waves, and then never know anything else. Those were the times he felt himself slip farther and farther away from who he was, his mind whispering, urging him to let go... To become the other Cole.

Those nights, he too shook, the other Cole's memories overlapping with the bleeding images of her nightmare, images he could not stop himself from viewing and experiencing. Cole could almost hear the other Cole's father's voice, and vaguely smell blood coagulating on his hands as he witnessed himself killing those mages in the spire over and over and over again.

If anyone would have found him in that state, they would panicked, thinking he had a seizure or were surely dying.

 

**No, Ellana Lavellan had been too deep, too engrossed in her grief, too far inside of herself to notice the changes that were occurring right under everyone's noses.**

 

 


End file.
